The People Are Not Enough

A Reply to Geese Magazine on Populism, Marxism, and Socialist Strategy

“The drama reached its climax within the walls of the House of Detention in St. Petersburg, where the prisoners of the ‘Movement to the People’ were being held for the Trial of the 193. In July 1877, General Trepov, the Governor-General, visited the prison. A young student, Arkhip Bogolyubov, failed to remove his hat in the General’s presence. Trepov, flying into a passion, ordered him to be flogged. This illegal punishment broke the young man’s spirit; he was driven completely insane by the humiliation and spent his remaining years in an asylum. But among his fellow prisoners, the blows of the rod re-awakened the spirit of desperate, violent revolt.” –Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia.

The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism is now available to order in print and digital format.

The Separation of Marxism and Populism

Arkhip Bogolyubo was a good Narodnik. Bogolyubov went out to the countryside during the “Mad Summer” of 1874 to agitate the peasantry. Like hundreds of his peers, he was quickly compromised—partly due to the inability of the peasants to keep the radicals’ presence a secret from local authorities—and arrested by the Tsarist police. Before even being formally tried, he was held in harsh imperial prisons for years as the state slowly gathered evidence for what would become the famous Trial of the 193 (the mass trial of the captured 1874 populists). In 1877, while still detained, Bogolyubov was visited in prison by the notorious Governor-General of St. Petersburg, General Fyodor Trepov. Bogolyubov either failed, or refused, to raise his cap to salute the Governor-General. In a fit of rage, Trepov ordered Bogolyubov to be illegally and brutally flogged. Bogolyubov’s suffering became a massive rallying cry for the remnants of the populist movement. It directly inspired the revolutionary Vera Zasulich to walk into General Trepov’s office a few months later and shoot him in retaliation, marking the pivot point where disillusioned Narodniki abandoned peaceful peasant agitation and turned toward the violent militancy of underground cells like Narodnaya Volya.

We know Zasulich in Marxists circles because of the debates on Russian peasant communes that she had with Marx in his later years, and the letters that Marx drafted to her to clarify his position. We also know that Lenin rejected both the Narodniki terror campaign and the campaign of “educating the people” made in the early period. There was also, importantly a split with the Narodniki’s successors, the Socialist Revolutionaries (aka, the S.R.s) who had similar divisions and similar tactical orientations. This anecdote reveals the intimate proximity between left populism and Marxism in the Russian context. There are unmistakable lipstick traces on the letters of history, even though the two movements never merged.

Let’s move to the U.S. context around the same time. In the 1890s, Eugene Debs, A.M. Simons, Victor Berger, and many other early leaders of American socialism were drawn to the populist movement under the People’s Party. But the collapse of the Populist movement came on faster than they could have imagined. Once the People’s Party aligned with the Democratic Party under William Jennings Bryan in 1896, combined with the decline in sharecropping as a viable economic system, the populist movement fell apart. This collapse led these figures to conclude that only an independent working-class political movement could achieve lasting social and political change. If the Popular Front in the mid-20th century emerges to once again forge a bond between socialism and populism, it works ultimately to undo this deep, but nonetheless crucial, separation. The history of how left-populism has seeped into Marxism since the time of the Popular Front is what we examine in our book and the relationship is rocky. Less lipstick traces and more on-off tragic romance.

Marxism and populism do not have the same sort of intimate relations that can be concretized in the postwar context as they do in the late 19th and early 20th century. Our comrades at Geese Magazine think that the marriage between populism and Marxism is still viable, and indeed, necessary if not inevitable. We contend that the impulse toward separation has remained a defining feature of Marxism and, indeed, of revolutionary socialism as a political project.

The Debate Defined

It is necessary for honest debate to create a discourse that can join with material interests that help to sharpen our theoretical understanding of politics in our time. We have welcomed such debate and thus have encouraged what we expected to be a critical review of our book from our left-populist comrades at Geese magazine. And we recognize that the underlying critique of our book, The People Are Not One, is not one of treachery but a comradely exchange, and we welcome that spirit of exchange, especially given that such comradely debate often spirals into invective in today’s climate. But there are contentions and errors that were made in the article that require a response. In his response to our book, comrade Ant L. accuses us of not having a specific definition of populism:

“The authors fall into the first classic trap of critiques of left populism: they fail to articulate a robust theory of what “populism” even is and, as a result, their argument fails to maintain analytical consistency across its 80 pages. Populism is defined in different terms in different chapters, and thus the reader is unable to follow the authors’ steps from claims to conclusions.”

Now, it must be said that Ant L. does not have such a consistent analytic definition of populism in the first place. In fact, populism, for our reviewer, is defined as an organic, unavoidable response to existing material conditions: “the acknowledgement by Marxists or socialists that we must accept politics as it appears.” Ant L. then limits this definition to a strictly electoral strategy that is expressed through prominent political campaigns, citing figures like Bernie Sanders or New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani as the key vessels of populism. This is an equivocation between a broader definition and a very specific one, but it may be necessary given the frenetic use of the term on the left, even within the last 10 years since 2016 when left-populism moved from the Occupy era projects of SYRIZA and Podemos to Corbyn and Sanders.

After all, the Mamdani project today is indeed very different from SYRIZA or Podemos, as these political parties are not legally viable in the US system. Furthermore, we have the gift of hindsight to see the flaws in both of them whereas Mamdani can easily be spoken of in glowing terms because we are not a full year into his first term. There is no way to gauge whether Mamdani’s policy victories will be substantive as history has not rendered such a verdict as clearly as it has on Bernie Sanders’ attempts at the Presidency or Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt at reforming the Labour Party, and more recently in heading up the independent party, Your Party, etc. The limitations and failures of these past left-populist movements are not in comrade Ant L.’s scorecard.

Indeed, comrade Ant L. is right that our discussion of populism shifts as the concept itself has changed. Historical analysis needs to be dialectical in the sense that the terms of politics themselves change in history. Any attempt to limit populism to a strict analytical definition is nearly impossible without some equivocation from an analytic point of view, as the term itself has developed historically.

In what follows, we will reiterate that we do in fact offer precise definitions of populism throughout the text. We identify both left and right populism as an in-built feature of neoliberal politics and we refer to this as the ‘populist horizon.’ The structural transformations in political economy since the 1970s have intensified class conflict in ways that existing bourgeois institutions, from the Democratic Party in the United States to the NGO-dominated infrastructure of civil society, have proven incapable of translating into an independent socialist politics. This impasse demands a renewed commitment to class analysis capable of organizing working class power on an independent and revolutionary basis. Yet the dominant trajectory of post-Marxism, beginning with Marcuse and extending through Laclau and Mouffe, has failed to confront this contradiction adequately. Rather than clarifying the antagonism between labor and capital, these approaches increasingly dissolve the working class into broader moral, cultural, and popular subject whose apparent unity obscures the real class antagonisms of capitalist society. Whether on the left or the right, the result is strikingly similar. The working class is no longer understood as the independent political subject of socialist transformation, but as an object to be represented, mobilized, or spoken for. The populist tendency on both the right and the left tends to treat the working class as a manichean symbol rather than a historically concrete social force. This is what we name the ‘populist’ drift, an inherently class collaborationist tendency to conceive the actors of history as outside of the working class or the labor movement. The problem with the populist way of thinking about class politics is that it relies on a mythical conception of the working class that fails to account for class antagonisms and fragmentation.

If comrade Ant L. wants to criticize us for this definition being both compound and biased against populism, since the definition contains an inherent critique; this would be fair. This is also our definition and critique of populism as it exists now, which is related to but distinct from populism in prior periods of historical development. We also define populism as inspiration for a broader set of appeals used by non-populists but rooted in a conception of cross-class popularity:

“...populist rhetoric emerged as a strategy for the bourgeoisie to manage the breakdown of the social-democratic consensus through what he called ‘moral panics,’ which would today incorporate the ‘culture wars.’ The culture war dovetails with the populist turn in that it concentrates social antagonisms into a discourse that routes political conflicts into emotional, affective, and cultural registers” (p. 7).

Again, central to our definition of populism is the concept of the populist horizon, which designates the ideological horizon within which bourgeois politics increasingly unfolds. It refers not to any particular policy or material manifestation of populism, but to the hegemony of populist rhetoric as the seemingly inevitable language of political contestation. Herein lies the ambiguity of any attempt to draw up a balance sheet on left-populist victories and defeats, namely the fact that the left-populist is ensconced in bourgeois institutions that are at odds with the underlying objectives that righteous popular rebellions and protests represent. This leads to the problem of paternalism and liberal ideology that left-populism cannot get outside of because its successes are ultimately conditioned by the hegemony of bourgeois parties. This is not a difference rooted in abstract ideas and theory but an institutional difference that portends significant consequences for any assessment of the successes of left-populism, let alone socialist politics in our time.

At the end of the day, we claim that contemporary socialists will have to face the populist horizon and we encourage that it be faced with a materialist point of view. Left-populism is a form of politics that is not completely free-floating or rhetorical, it has its own practical understanding of political economy and of capitalism. Laclau, as we note in the book, ended up abandoning core Marxist commitments as he embraced left-populism, the most significant being that he abandoned the notion that there is a constitutive antagonism between labor and capital as the primary contradiction of the current capitalist system (pp. 36 - 37). This contention is not a mere theoretical position with no stakes in practice, it is a reflection of Laclau’s embrace of a populist orientation over that of a Marxist-oriented socialist one.

But Laclau’s divergence from a Marxist view of capitalism can be traced back to the long-standing ideological divergence between socialism and populism. We note that, “ideologically, the populist conception of capitalism drew from physiocratic (i.e., agricultural land-based) theories of political economy and currents of liberal and republican thought. These influences resulted in a rather inchoate sense of individualism which, perhaps paradoxically, projected a far less coherent account of collective class interest than did the socialist tradition” (p. 12). While the original class base of populism was agrarian (the peasantry in central and Eastern Europe, sharecroppers in the United States) the through-line from classical populism to today’s populism is found in the tendency towards class collaborationism and a lack of interest in abolishing capital or property. The difference between socialist and populist conceptions of class antagonism–and indeed of capitalism as a system–strike us as exceedingly clear, both historically and in our present.

Lastly, and related to this point, we argue that populism functions on both the right and the left to obscure real class antagonisms by projecting a false unity of ‘the people.’ This reduces the working class to an abstract moral category and thereby undermines the practical work of building genuine class consciousness and solidarity. It is true that with this last claim, specifically, we widen the category of what counts as left populism to include tendencies such as Communization theory as expressed by Endnotes, as well as various entryist gambits in the U.S. Democratic Party. If such a position strikes Ant L. as confusing, we will remind the author that we identify three key traits that we find across all populist political movements, left or right, going back to Marx’s discussion of Bonapartism, which had a similar appeal:

1. The Subversion of Class for Moral or Cultural Abstractions

Instead of defining political subjects by their objective structural relationship to production or even coherent strata of consumption, every variant of populism substitutes an abstract, moralized, or emotional category that creates the appearance of a broad coalition that subsumes the vast majority of society, despite any conflicting interests within the grouping.

2. The Projection of a False Unity Upon “The People”

Populism relies on creating a free-floating, flattened collective identity that intentionally glides over the deep economic fragmentation and internal divisions within the working class itself. This is implicit in the first trait, which also explains why populist rhetoric extends far beyond obvious populist politics.

3. The rejection of independent political agency within the working class

By decoupling politics from the contradictions between capital and labor as well as tensions WITHIN the working classes, these definitions show that populism strips the working class of its unique, foundational role as an independent historical agent. The working classes are rendered into something to be spoken for or acted against.

These points hardly add up to an unclear definition. We aim to develop a definition of populism that is broad enough to account for the shifting social and political constituencies that populist figures, whether on the left or the right, seek to assemble. We admit, for example, that the class basis of modern populism is different from Russian and American populism of the 19th and early 20th century which had a large agrarian core. And in fact, we imply that both right and left populism today pull from precarious and dependent strata of society, i.e., the most lumpenized and the most adjacent to the petite bourgeoisie.

The principal social base of left populism is the professional-managerial strata. Although many occupy petite bourgeois positions as knowledge workers, even those who are wage earners and belong to the working class have largely been socialized into petite bourgeois ideological assumptions, notwithstanding their growing precarity and downward mobility. For right populists, the coalition is with Sunbelt petite bourgeois, the rural and exurban lumpenized, and private equity. The class base of both right and left populism strike us as highly similar to right and left Bonapartist politics in the mid-19th century model in France. This is because we see both continuity and rupture in populist movements stretching back to the origins of socialist politics in the 1830s.

A Question of Balls and Strikes

Comrade Ant L. then says that we have

“a total lack of any engagement with left populism’s impressive political victories across the world in the 21st century and the ways in which left populism has enabled the resuscitation of organized leftism such that a media ecosystem and political infrastructure hospitable to debates about left populism can even exist. Put simply, while I, too, remember a time in American leftism before the rise of Bernie Sanders, no honest critique of Sanders can elide the ways in which his late career has transformed the political landscape of the United States. Thus, any critique of left populism must contend with the ways in which left populism has transformed the author’s own historical moment.”

To properly gauge the political successes – the wins and losses – of left-populism is an exceedingly difficult, if not impossible task. This is due to the fact that contemporary left-populism relies on a popular front strategy with the established liberal progressive end of the two bourgeois parties. This reliance conditions the imperatives of the progressive liberal party to lord over all left-populist activity and ultimately to take credit for left-populist victories. Moreover, this reliance, which we analyze through the concept of paternalism, reveals the core problem with Laclau and Mouffe’s left-populist strategy.

Our contention is twofold: populism is definable as a distinct political practice with a coherent philosophy and general orientation to political demands that are far afield from the socialist tradition and Marxism. Secondly, once left-populism is tied to a general civil society strategy that aims to coordinate disparate social movements (Laclau and Mouffe) this strategy leads to a hyperpolitics that prevents any coherent balance sheet regarding what is a distinct populist victory versus what isn’t.

While Comrade Ant L. may be old enough to remember a time before Sanders, when such debates were “impossible”, we find this to be a questionable statement that Sanders alone changed the landscape or that left populism was outside of the general consciousness. After all, debates around left populism defined the left of the aughts (2000 — 2009). While not exactly populists, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire was famously displayed next to mass-market horror novels in airport book stalls due to sheer demand. The book had profiles in The New York Times and Time magazine, which pushed it so far into the public debate that it became a bestseller.

At the same time, and even before the aughts, debates about the success of strategies proposed by Mouffe and Laclau in their 1985 work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy were common within the activist left and in academia. Indeed, the left-populist debate between Laclau, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek in 2000 captured a great deal of attention within academic and leftist activist circles.¹ Given the class collaborationist premise of both the Empire series and Laclau and Mouffe’s work, the popular debate about left populism has been a defining feature of socialist politics for the last 30 - 40 years. But it is worth noting that even Hart and Negri do not valorize populism but point to its tendency to fracture working class solidarity. What is more likely is that the geopolitics of empire after 9-11 stalled the discussion of left populism more than its lack of concretization in a figure like Bernie Sanders.

Yet, we would agree that Sanders either embodied or led – we would argue the former – the shift in the media landscape that corresponded to other neo-populist movements like Occupy Wall Street. If we are going to talk about honesty, we think our comrades should be careful about what is invoked. The point of Sanders’s campaign was not just to “move the Overton Window.” It was about the expansion of working-class power explicitly, led by a youth coalition.

Is this populist? In rhetoric, yes, as Bernie’s 99% rhetoric flew through the media, both legacy and new and reenergized a popular turn to issues of inequality in politics. But as a practical goal is this politics populist? That is harder to say. What is easier to say is that on its own terms, the practical aims of Sanders’s movement did not materialize. We have not witnessed any reversal in the long-term decline of union density in the United States. The steepest losses occurred between 1979 and 1983, when organized labor shed more than one-third of its private-sector membership. While there is now broad agreement that this decline has been socially and politically damaging, did the Sanders campaigns fundamentally alter this trajectory? No.

In fact, there were a few mild spikes in union density in the US during a period of flattening after the Great Recession. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there was a brief increase in U.S. union density during the early part of that window, though the overall long-term trend has remained downward. National union density rose from 12.1% in 2007 to 12.4% in 2008. This small statistical uptick wasn’t driven by a massive wave of new labor organizing; rather, it was a byproduct of the Great Recession. Because non-unionized jobs, particularly in sectors like construction, were being wiped out faster than heavily unionized public and industrial sectors at the very beginning of the crash, the relative proportion of union members in the workforce temporarily spiked. Following that minor bump, density resumed its slide, dropping to 12.3% in 2009, hitting 11.9% in 2010, and ultimately settling at 11.1% by 2014 and 2015, where it plateaued. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private sector union density has hit a historic low of 5.9% in the US.

It must be noted that this came precisely after Sanders’ campaign began, i.e., there was no increase in unionization after the campaign. There were, however, significant public sector labor victories in red states and some high-profile campaigns for increasing unions in the service sector. We speak about this as part of the fragmentation of the working class in our book. This is not Sanders’ fault. That is not our contention. It was owed to the fact that Sanders’s left populist coalition never achieved any viable independence from the bourgeois parties that ultimately co-opted his achievements. If left-populist victories are measured on the terrain of rhetoric and discourse, any expression of popular energies of revolt is registered as an achievement. The error of this metric for measuring political success is that it is idealist; it mistakes the display of popular energies for lasting political change, when in reality, what has occurred is far more transient.

Within the electoral arena, Sanders’s campaign made a name for itself for its remarkable electoral engagement with the youth vote in 2016 and 2020. However, upon closer scrutiny, the youth share of Sanders’s support base actually dropped in 11 out of 12 key primary states. Sanders also lost significant ground in his home state of Vermont and dropped key states he had won in 2016, such as Michigan and Washington, due to an inability to expand his message beyond his core 2016 base.

To make contemporary left-populism a movement about Sanders is misleading. Sanders has been an incredibly powerful advocate for progressive policies in Congress and has had many significant successes as well as many high-profile failures. His successes include the 2009 Energy Efficiency Block Grant Program, getting $11 billion in mandatory funding for community health centers in the ACA, getting a Federal Reserve audit amendment to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, and helping reform the Veterans Affairs in 2014. Following his presidential runs, however, Sanders has had fewer major legislative successes: The College for All Act, The End Polluter Welfare & Fracking Ban Acts, and The AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act all failed. Medicare For All did not even get a proper vote and has been perpetually unable to get out of the committee. During the Presidency of Joe Biden, Sanders’s major wins were primarily supporting Biden’s agenda, like helping progressives get some of their concerns in the Inflation Reduction Act. Now, we admit that expecting Sanders to be effective from 2010 to 2018, when there were GOP majorities in Congress, is a steep demand but some of his clearest legislative victories happen during this time. There is, however, no such excuse from 2018 to 2022.

The emphasis on Senator Sanders as a cultural influencer helped generate a media ecosystem that, from the standpoint of our critique, is more than a little ironic. This presents a double problem, both for us and for our comrades at Geese. First, this move itself seems to shift the goalpost, instead of dealing with Sanders on the terms of his political projects, one speaks about him as enabling a cultural possibility for left politics, and this is then registered as a ‘victory’ for left-populism. This is the kind of goalpost-moving that we trace all the way back to Stuart Hall’s analysis, in which cultural battles are selectively picked as a means to weigh political novelty and gauge political antagonisms. While this is not the culture war mentality that most often defines populism, it is a structurally similar shift in focus. Similarly, if we look at Sanders’s second Presidential campaign, there is a significant correlation between his stalling out in the 2020 primaries and his adoption of talking points that were more aligned with professional activists and younger Democratic party consultants. These rhetorical moves were explicitly made to incorporate the trends of the Democratic Party’s younger cadre and were aimed at increasing youth and minority participation. While it is impossible to prove singular causation in this instance, it seems that Sanders’s move to be more inclusive of “woke” talking points in his public framework, at the very minimum, had no positive effect and that the adoption of this rhetorical strategy correlates with his inability to mobilize a serious youth base.

Considering the mayoral administration of Zohran Mamdani, it is far, far too early to call wins or losses for even his agenda, much less for socialism or left-populism. Again, the desire to conflate the two strikes us as perfunctory and sloppy. We can, however, call a few balls and strikes thus far, and the truth is that Mamdani’s record is very mixed. According to socialist writer Jack Fate:

Mamdani’s campaign had a lot of vibes, but it also came with promises to pursue concrete policies. Free childcare, a rent freeze (and more affordable housing in general), free buses, and reigning in the police department were among the most prominent, and most of these were to be funded by taxing the wealthy. His progress on all of these fronts has been limited. As soon as he took office, Mamdani immediately announced that he had discovered a $12 billion hole in New York City’s budget, which was later (and rather suddenly) pared down to $5 billion, still a hefty sum. He failed to push New York Governor Kathy Hochul to institute a new tax regime, beyond the pittance of a $500 million pied-à-terre tax on second homes in the city, which covers about 10% of the $5 billion deficit, and which by definition means a lot of people subject to it will not even be city residents. With Hochul, he announced the launch of a 2-K program to compliment the 3-K and Pre-K programs created by Bill De Blasio a decade ago. For the first year, this will be available for five school districts in the city out of 32 total and will serve 2,000 kids in a city of almost 9 million people. The official plan is to expand the 2K program city-wide by year four. Hochul has pledged to fully fund the first two years . . . .Mamdani’s housing plan landed with a thud. The most prominent policy goal is to build 200,000 new “affordable” units. One of the areas he has targeted for redevelopment is along Coney Island Avenue, just south of Prospect Park. . . These buildings are bright, shiny, and chock-full of amenities, but also have tiny units which are way overpriced. Often, these days, a “two-bedroom” unit is the size of most mid-century one bedrooms, just subdivided with an extra wall. Moreover, a cursory glance at the prices show these new units are far from “affordable” ….[t]hese buildings are not affordable housing—they are luxury housing…. When it comes to public housing, Mamdani has chosen to handle the problem of crumbling infrastructure by continuing a pre-existing program started during De Blasio’s administration that allows private property managers to take over management of public housing projects. No numbers for Mamdani’s specific initiative were provided, notably, but the report outlining the plan declares that an objective of this program is to help “deliver comprehensive repairs and long-term stability.”

Now, we would not necessarily be as dire as this policy breakdown indicates. Mamdani has had electoral victories with his slate in NYC, albeit with the caveat that the NYC DSA’s slate is NOT identical to Mamdani’s slate, despite the DSA claiming victory on that front, as Mamdani’s endorsement is not the same as national or even local DSA chapters. Mamdani’s success at balancing the budget was partly due to help from the Governor, in exchange for dropping a threat of a general property tax increase, and from renegotiating and restructuring a bad pension deal from former Mayor Eric Adams. Almost none of the gap was covered by the pied-a-terre tax. Mamdani has been able to get a rent freeze through the New York City Board, but why should this been seen as a qualified victory. 1-year leases have been frozen before (under both the de Blasio and early pandemic-era boards); this is the first time in the board’s 56-year history that a 2-year lease renewal has been frozen. Moreover, there are limits: the freeze is strictly for rent-stabilized apartments, not traditional rent control and market-rate apartments. Still, the freeze applies to roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, representing about 40% of the city’s total rental housing stock and affecting over 2 million residents.

If the success of left populism is measured by the ability of left-populist leaders to remain in office, then the experiences of our European counterparts in Greece and Spain suggest that this is an unreliable metric. If success is instead measured by policy achievements, it remains too early to assess the case of Mamdani. It is not yet clear whether his administration will become politically stalled or whether his public appeal will sustain him in office, particularly as many New Yorkers are not aware of the city’s underlying fiscal constraints. What we can say despite is that Mamdani’s historic wins are modest extensions of policies that have been expressed by more standard Democrats like Bill DiBlasio: both the housing supply and rent freezes are expansions of DiBlasio’s policies. The difference is that the DSA and people around Our Revolution-descended PACs are invested in sharing these policies and asserting they are unique. This tendency to exaggerate left-populist policy successes, which in reality often remain within the horizon of progressive liberalism, follows from placing excessive emphasis on rhetoric and discourse. This produces a characteristic blindness to the actual political content of these policies.

Mamdani’s most unique trait is his dedication and willingness to try to leverage a possible relationship with more traditional mainstream Democrats with a D.S.A.. insurgency, and doing so by expanding it in a direction that is in line with the more conciliatory factions within the DSA’s agenda. Even in areas where we see true victories, such as the recent victories of Mamdani’s endorsees, they are not without contradictions. The week we published our book, the DSA was claiming victory for Mamdani’s slate as if Mamdani’s slate was a victory for the DSA’s slate. But it was not. While Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez are both members of and endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Brad Lander is neither a DSA member nor an endorsed candidate. This distinction became a source of controversy when Mamdani reportedly intervened in an effort to persuade a DSA-endorsed candidate to withdraw from the race in order to consolidate support behind Lander.

All of this is predictable with our theory that populism has to maintain conflicting interests in its coalitions due to its paternalistic reliance on bourgeois parties and the hegemony of those interests. Mamdani may be okay with freaking out James Carville and with supporting more left candidates like Chevalier and Valdez but he will need support from establishment figures such as Governor Hochul and Representative Jeffries to maintain funding for his agenda. This will lead to compromises that will inevitably alienate elements of his coalition; and if austerity starts to be imposed from higher levels of government, Mamdani’s response to that will define his future. In the early 1980s, Francois Mitterand supporters in France faced similar problems and it added fuel to the fire of disillusionment with both the French socialist and communist parties in the 1990s and aughts. Mamdani may avoid this fate, but it is not something we can say from this moment so early in his campaign.

The core of Comrade Ant L.’s argument is that left populism has achieved “impressive political victories,” while the “pure Marxist” alternatives we propose have achieved very little in the 21st century. However, when evaluating left populism’s actual governance failures, our comrade completely shifts his metric of success: when Mamdani fails to reign in the NYPD or fire Jessica Tisch, Comrade Ant L. argues that this failure is actually a success because the campaign created the condition of possibility for criticism. He calls it a “progressive defeat.”

Conversely, Comrade Ant L. judges any alternative strategy strictly by its lack of historical implementation. This creates a logical double standard: Left populism is allowed to count its empirical failures as long-term structural victories, whereas other alternatives are written off as not having recent victories, and pre-21st-century victories are not addressed at all in the review. If a “progressive defeat” counts as a success for populism, the same grace should logically be extended to other leftist strategies, including the ones we propose.

Still, our comrades at Geese magazine may be surprised to learn that we are still agnostic on whether or not Sander’s or Mamdani’s shifting of the debate is a victory or a loss “for socialism” (or for left-populism). The reasons for that, like Comrade Ant L., are that we too think that a purely working-class political movement is not on the immediate horizon. Comrade Ant L. implies that this is part of the problem with our argument, which is that our strategy requires too much patience when the fights are happening right now. This, perhaps, is fair, but a movement’s success or failure is judged by results over various time scales, not just by the seeming possibility of immediate movement. If Mamdani fails to deliver on substantive change, it can lead to a backlash, and the history of progressive mayors in the late 20th and early 21st century tend to follow this course from Dennis Kucinich in Cleveland to David Dinkins in New York to Chokwe Antar Lumumba in Jackson to Brandon Johnson in Chicago.

What we do insist upon, however, is that victories go beyond merely electing leaders to positions and counting that as a win in and of itself. SYRIZA and Podemos went much further in electoral victories, France Unbowed has much deeper penetration in French society and in the legislature, and is an order of magnitude larger in loose affiliation than even the DSA at its current 105k-107k, which has about 15k membership in New York City and only about 4k in LA County. This relatively low membership base is not a failure of the Democratic Socialists of America, but it does make some of the claims about “unprecedented” success more qualified, considering that far larger movements have failed in Europe and Latin America in recent years.

‘The People’ as the only form of politics?

When addressing our critique of theorist Jacques Rancière, comrade Ant L. notes our warning: populism risks becoming ensnared in a reductive, totalizing image of “the people”—a fantasy originally projected by the ruling class.

Our reviewer explicitly agrees with this danger, admitting, “any political undertaking risks reifying the same underlying power paradigm.” However, instead of logically addressing how left populism can overcome this fatal flaw, he dismisses it with a shrug: “What else have we ever done? What strategy escapes this danger?” This is nothing more than special pleading. Furthermore, it is highly debatable that every successful socialist policy has given in to this danger. Lenin never once forgot the class contradictions of the late Russian empire or the tensions between 1919 and 1921. If Comrade Ant L. thinks Lenin wavered from those concerns, this has to be proven and settled with far more than a rhetorical question and a shrug.

We are not proposing that class unity would lead to a politics without antagonism: ideological, ethnic, racial, geographic and sectional tensions will continue to exist within the working class and have to be worked out politically and socially. We argue that structural antagonisms are not fundamental in the way they are presented within populist conceptions of class struggle, which reduce the diverse antagonisms between classes to a single, homogeneous opposition. We argue that ignoring these tensions within the working class is what so often leads to populist tendencies that treat workers as noble subjects to be acted upon, not as potential leaders of our movement. Getting our class theory right does not strike us as an impossible demand for socialists, and moreover, we see it as central to socialist strategy.

Talleyrand and Other Metaphors

Lastly, Comrade Ant L. frames his entire piece around an anecdote about the cynical French diplomat Talleyrand, who hears a riot in the street and tells his servant “We are winning!” but refuses to specify who “we” is until tomorrow. He uses this to argue that we must “head downstairs and step into the confrontation that exists before us.” But the analogy actually undermines his point. Talleyrand was a master class-compromiser and survivalist who shifted allegiances to maintain ruling-class power regardless of who won. This strategy is structurally only possible when defending the status quo. Using a historical symbol of elite opportunism to justify a “bottom-up” left-populist strategy is a severe misalignment of logic, and to us it is an odd admission; it implies that populism is fundamentally about opportunistic positioning rather than principled socialist transformation. To Marxists, it has always very much mattered who we are; others can throw their lot in with the proletariat; we defend the merger formula after all. The proletariat is the subject of our politics. Our politics can not merely be throwing our lot in with today’s seeming winners.

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Book Launch Live Stream: The People Are Not One

1. Most notably, see Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000).